argento dissertation - by Keith Hennessey Brown

Introduction

Dario Argento was born in Rome on September 7, 1940. His Italian father, Salvatore, was in the film business and his Brazilian mother, Elda Luxardo, a photographer. He completed formal education at 18 and later became a film critic for the left-wing daily newspaper Paese Sera, an experience he likened to university for learning about film1. He began freelancing as a screen-writer, predominantly on the then-popular western and war genres, including work on Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968) with Bernardo Bertolucci2.

In 1969 Argento made his directorial debut - unusually he had neither made short films nor served an 'apprenticeship' as assistant to an established film-maker3 - with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, an example of the giallo, or Italian-style thriller. Argento's father acted as producer for SEDA Spettacoli4 and would go on to produce all his films to Suspiria (at which point his younger brother, Claudio, took up production duties) while Leone's regular composer Ennio Morricone scored. A commercial and critical success, the film was followed by two others in a similar vein, Cat o' Nine Tails (1970) and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1972). Together the so-called "Animal Trilogy" established Argento's position as one of Italy's premier popular film-makers5 whilst eliciting predictable "garlic flavoured Hitchcock"6 responses from Anglophone critics.

Argento then explored fresh avenues with Le cinque giornate (1973), a historical drama set amidst an abortive revolt against the occupying Austrian forces prior to Italy's unification7. A poorly received box-office failure never released internationally8 the 'experiment' paid belated dividends with 1975's Deep Red, a triumphant return to the giallo significant for bringing Argento together with two key collaborators, the actress Daria Nicolodi and the group Goblin9. Argento and Nicolodi's daughter Asia was born the same year with the couple working together until their 1989 separation while Goblin and its members have contributed to most of Argento's subsequent films10. Achieving a release in the US, Deep Red also saw the overt introduction of supernatural themes, thereby presaging Argento's next project, the 1977 fantasy-horror Suspiria which, as the director's greatest commercial success to date, was retroactively reworked into the first part of a trilogy, 1980's Inferno developing the mythology of the three witch-mothers of Sighs (Suspiriorum), Tears (Lachrymarum) and Darkness (Tenebrarum). Less well received, the film suffered from poor US distribution; a fate that has plagued many of the director's subsequent releases. Perhaps in consequence Argento's next film 1982's Tenebrae, did not complete the trilogy, which remains unfinished to date, instead marking a return to the giallo with its title being explained by Argento as reference to the darkness of the soul11. (Ironically the film's visuals are cold, clinical, bright and ultra-modern style.)

Phenomena (1985), Argento's first English-language production, was seen as something of a disappointment by comparison, a "greatest hits package"12 of characteristic themes and motifs. 1987's Opera likewise broke little new ground, although re-affirmed Argento's position as a maker of superior gialli. This period also saw Argento increasingly take the role of producer-cum-mentor for younger directors within his circle such as Michele Soavi and Lamberto Bava - both of who had worked as his assistants - in addition to various other extra-filmmaking roles13. 1989 saw Argento make his first film in the United States, collaborating with American horror specialist George A. Romero whose Dawn of the Dead (1978) was co-produced, part-financed and distributed in Europe by Argento and his family14. Though Two Evil Eyes, based on stories by Edgar Allan Poe15, was poorly received, Argento remained Stateside for his next film, Trauma (1993). Notable for its synthesis of giallo and slasher movie and the presence of the teenage Asia Argento in the lead role, it again failed to make an impact, prompting Argento's return to Italy.

The 1996 giallo The Stendhal Syndrome was followed by an adaptation of Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera (1998), both also starring Asia. Responses were muted, some com-emendators questioning whether the director had finally lost his touch while others signs of a maturation of style. Sleepless (2001) and The Card Player (2004) have failed to resolve these de-bates, the former showing a return to old form if not necessarily an obvious progression from it and the latter indicating that Argento is still willing to experiment through its emphasis on improvisation and use of natural lighting16.

We can thus distinguish Argento from peers like Sergio Martino (born 1938, Rome), Enzo Castellari/Enzo Girolami (1938, Rome) and Ruggero Deodato (1940, Potenza) in various regards: Whereas a Castellari is likely only to be known by cult cinema enthusiasts in Italy and internationally17, Argento, though perhaps not a name the majority of filmgoers may be that familiar with, nevertheless has some marquee value in his own right, especially domestically18. Consequently where most directors working in the Italian popular cinema have found themselves compelled to work within whatever filone or genre/cycle is in vogue at the time or to work in television19, Argento is in the relatively comfortable position of having a ready market for his giallo and horror films20. It is also however somewhat indicative of the current state of the Italian industry that The Stendhal Syndrome originated as a television production, with this in turn raising questions whether as of late Argento may have perceived the need to make gialli and orrore films because they are expected of him and if support for something different would be forth-coming. Here a comparison with Leone seems apposite: With his Italian westerns Leone man-aged to likewise define and transcend an existing filone21. But even he struggled to bring Once Upon a Time in America (1984) to the screens, despite the film's very title pointing to the continuation of the same project of interrogating America's foundational myths through an outsider's reinterpretation of the codes and conventions of its genre cinema22 and a more favourable production climate. Put another way, Argento's position appears more akin to that of another great influence, Mario Bava, in terms of having the opportunity to 'keep working' more than anything else.

As indicated by the "garlic flavoured Hitchcock" remark, the casual response to Argento is to interpret him as the Italian "master of suspense". While it is undoubtedly the case that there are moments within Argento's films that feel Hitchcockian - the poisoned glass of milk in Cat o' Nine Tails might be read as a quotation from Suspicion (1946), for instance - not to mention that Hitchcock's status and influence are such that most every film-maker, especially if working in the same broad generic territory, has to work out their relationship to him23, to view Argento's gialli as straightforward rehashes of the Hitchcockian thriller is simplistic and reductive: We must acknowledge the intervening and intermediating presence of filmmakers like Riccardo Freda and, especially, Bava, in the Italian industry of the 1950s and 1960s. Their 24 I Vampiri (1956), generally acknowledged as the first Italian horror film25, introduced to the nation's cinema a similar blend of motifs and influences to those Hitchcock had made his stock in trade, while Bava's seminal giallo The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Freda's tale of necrophiliac amour fou The Horrible Dr Hitchcock (both 1962) made the connections explicit through their very titles. Accordingly, when we see something 'Hitchcockian' in a Argento film we should question whether it might not be referencing Bava instead; a point some critics, with a tendency to overemphasise a limited canon of film-makers, texts and genres (Hitchcock, his 'men who knew too much' and Hollywood) would not necessarily recognise26.

Following from this is the issue of the common yet eclectic pool of influences from which many film-makers working within the mystery/thriller area have long drawn inspiration, including popular fiction and avant-garde Expressionist and Surrealist27 experiments. Or, to put it an-other way through a more concrete example, does a foggy street scene in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage refer to Hitchcock's The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1926), G. W. Pabst's Pandora's Box (1929) - and note here that the killer in Argento's film is sometimes likened to Jack the Ripper) or Fritz Lang's M (1931) - to name but three possible sources? Indeed can any single point of origin ever really be identified, especially in these 'post-modern' times? Yet, counterpoising this, a distinctively Continental European28 take on such material can be discerned. For, as Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs (1995) write:
If it's fantastique it has to be erotic, way out and fabulous. Linear narrative and logic are always ignored in a fantastique film. The pictorial, the excessive and the irrational are the privileged factors.29
Though there are certainly differences between the giallo - or, at this stage, our emerging notion of such - and the fantastique film, into which a Suspiria might be fitted30, Tohill and Tombs go on to suggest how these principles might apply here, with specific reference to Hitch-cock, Bava and Freda:
[T]he basis of much of the criticism aimed at [the European fantastique cinema]... is related to what Alfred Hitchcock called the 'ice-box effect'. That's to say that moment when the spectator gets home after seeing a film, goes to the ice-box for a beer and then says 'Hey, wait a minute!' And suddenly the whole structure of the film collapses in his mind's eye - he has seen the fatal flaw in its dramatic logic. Hitchcock spent a long time trying to get around this difficulty, with his famous 'MacGuffin', and through judicious use of cinematic point-of-view. Freda, Bava et al solved the problem by simply ignoring it, or by creating circular, unsolvable plots that spiral out of control in the mind of the over-analytic viewer. The most common solution, however - and it doesn't sound like a solution at all - was to repeat the same plot trick in film after film until, finally, the notion of salvation becomes a meaningless one. Plots come to consist of what Alain Robbe-Grillet, in a literary context, called 'generators'. That's to say they are launching off points for both audience and film-maker into a shared world of wonder, terror and spectacle.31
While, as will be seen, the manipulation of spectator point of view is a key component of Argento's cinema, and thus an elements that might legitimately be labelled 'Hitchcockian', his convoluted plots and non-sequiturs are prone to leave rational-linear minded viewers exasperated. Likewise if the reference to Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau roman seems pretentious it is worth noting both the casting of Last Year at Marienbad's (Alain Resnais, 1959; from a screen-play by Robbe-Grillet) Sacha Pitoeff in Inferno and some of the other film-makers besides Bava, Leone and Lang Argento has acknowledge as influences: Luchino Visconti32, Luis Bunuel, Ingmar Bergman, F. W. Murnau33 , Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov34 , Pier Paolo Pasolini35, Michelangelo Antonioni and Michael Powell. Or the fact that a shot of water going down a drain in Suspiria was copied from Japanese director Teinosuke Kinugasa's avant-garde A Page of Mad-ness (1926)36 - the kind of obscure reference normally more likely to be associated with a Jean-Luc Godard entry37. Indeed I would venture that Antonioni and Powell are as important to under-standing Argento as Hitchcock, the former for his modernist and phenomenological interrogations of the cinematic image, the latter for his unwavering commitment to 'pure' spectacular and excessive cinema.

Returning now to the gialli, it should be becoming apparent the 'Italian thriller' label is equally unsatisfactory. The initial problem is that we are really discussing two things; giallo as a literary form and as later, cinematic form. The term itself is Italian for yellow, with similar etymological roots to its French cousin noir: Whereas in France hard-boiled detective novels were first published under the imprint of the serie noire in black covers, so in Italy suspense and detective novels - and note here the multiplication of terms of reference: mystery, thriller, hard-boiled, detective and suspense, not all of which may be found in any individual text - were published in distinctive yellow covers by Mondadori, beginning in 1929. Compounding the confusion here is an alternative suggestion that the term may also refer to the low-quality paper used, thereby raising questions as to the relationship between giallo and the overlapping category of the 'pulp'. The giallo film, however, did not really emerge until the 1960s with the aforementioned The Girl Who Knew Too Much/The Evil Eye and Blood and Black Lace/Six Women for the Murderer (Mario Bava, 1964)38. Here the picture is further complicated by the entry of a third strand of crime literature and cinema in the form of the German krimi39 translations of works by the British crime thriller author Edgar Wallace (1875-1932) - works that can be situated more firmly within the pulp tradition. Though enormously popular in Weimar Germany there were only a couple of official adaptations of Wallace's work prior to the rise of the Nazis - who predictably deemed such material decadent and un-German40 - though it could be argued that the world of Lang's Dr Mabuse the Gambler (1923), Spies (1928) and The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1932) is not that distant41.

The real boom in the krimi film and its emergence as a distinct type was thus a post-war phenomenon with over 30 Wallace-related releases from Rialto film and their rivals CCC between 1959 and 197242, beginning with The Fellowship of the Frog (Harald Reinl, 1959). The presence of Reinl in turn is significant, his subsequent helming of some of the 'Winnetou' westerns like The Treasure of Silver Lake (1962) and Winnetou the Warrior (1963) reminding us of the relationships between the krimi and the giallo and the German and Italian westerns43. In both instances the smaller, more obscure German cycle fed into44 the larger, better known Italian one, with this also being accompanied by a number of co-productions and some movement of personnel45. (It can also be remarked here that Lang himself returned to the Mabuse character with The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960), prompting a revival of interest in the character and his use by other film-makers in the wake of the krimi and European spy film cycles.46) But whereas the cynicism and decadence of the Italian western is far removed from the romanticism of Karl May's Winnetou stories, the emphasis on horror and sadistic violence within the krimi47 can be seen as another influence on the giallo, even if direct references such as the way in which the use of a tape recorded voice to entrap the heroine in The Girl Who Knew too Much is prefigured by a similar device in Alfred Vohrer's The Dead Eyes of London (1961)48 are harder to discern.

It is nevertheless surprising when Maitland McDonagh, otherwise a perceptive commentator on Argento's work, neglects to mention the krimi connection when contextualising Argento's early gialli49, given that The Bird with the Crystal Plumage was an Italian-West German co-production and actually (falsely) marketed in the latter as an Edgar Wallace adaptation. Lest it be thought that this is an isolated example it can also be noted that the slightly later post-Argento giallo co-productions What Have You Done to Solange? (Massimo Dallamano, 1971) and Seven Bloodstained Orchids (Umberto Lenzi, 1972) were actually inspired by Wallace tales, with the former also giving prominent roles to ex-krimi performers Joachim Fuchsberger and Karin Baal.

Another problem is how well giallo cinema fits established models of genre. Here we can start by saying that, of all the recognised American genres the closest cinematic antecedent of the giallo would appear to be film noir. Or, at the risk of flippantly paraphrasing Luce Irigaray, 'the genre that is not one'50. Things become still more muddled when we consider the relationship between the distinctively Italian notion of filone and broader, though typically somewhat Holly-wood-centric, notion of genre. Filone, which might be translated as 'stream' or 'tributary', can be described as 'formula' films, designed to cash-in on a domestic or foreign success before audience interest wanes. In some respects, then, filone and genre do appear broadly equivalent. Both are offering the same sense of confined innovation, or dominant repetition and subordinate difference, endeavouring to work small variations and innovations while remaining immediately recognisable as instances of a 'type'. Against this, however, the brevity of many filone cycles is difficult to accommodate within the dominant strand of genre theory that tends to take a longer time frame51. Thus, for instance, whereas the history of the American western film encompasses essentially the entire lifespan of cinema52, its Italian cousin waxed and waned over a far shorter period of perhaps 10-15 years53. (Admittedly the giallo has shown greater longevity, given it is now over 40 years since The Girl Who Knew Too Much.) So too is the fluidity - the obvious term of choice, reinforcing the water imagery of the term - with which filone cinema operates. Thus, for example, the 'mondo' film cycle of the 1960s can be read as feeding into the emergent cannibal film of the early-mid 1970s which then in turn received a boost with the success of the zombie film in the later 1970s to bring about hybrid horrors such as Cannibal Apocalypse (Antonio Margheriti, 1980) and Zombie Holocaust (Marino Girolami, 1980), the former featuring cannibals who act like zombies and the latter hedging its bets by including both.54

A filone such as the giallo thus needs to be understood in its own contexts. As Gary Needham (2003)55 has argued, if genre theories are to be deployed theirs must be a cautious application; one that aids our appreciation of the ongoing discourse of the giallo and does not attempt to reify its process of development in some essentialising manner. While we can still then recognise that further work is needed to tease out the full inter-relationships between the filone cinema and its American genre cousin56 it also becomes possible to identify a series of discourses with which the typical giallo is concerned. These - the list again comes from Needham - include murder, mystery, detection, psychoanalysis, tourism/travel, and investigation.

This in turn explains why an attempt to define Argento as simply an "Italian slasher director", as Carol J Clover (1992)57 does, albeit in passing, is misguided. Many themes and motifs that define the slasher film simply do not apply. Thus, for example, gialli protagonists are usually adults rather than adolescents58 and, perhaps concomitantly, there is little of the repressive puritanism that equates sex with death, as epitomised by the virginal "final girl" who is permitted to survive to the end credits. Likewise, whereas it is conventional for slasher film killers to return again and again, as witnessed by the Friday the 13th, Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street series, there are no real giallo equivalents, the archetypal giallo killer returns only as archetype59. This is not, however, to deny that there are connections between the giallo and the slasher film - as indicated previously Trauma would be one obvious counterfactual here - more to reiterate the point that the relationships are complex, nuanced ones.

Within the space available it is clearly impossible to examine each of Argento's films in such detail and hope to do them justice, especially when his claims to auteur status would mean that even the lesser films such as Phenomena would merit close reading60. Accordingly we will be concentrating on Deep Red and Suspiria. Released back-to-back in the mid-1970s these are probably Argento's most exemplary films, representing as they do his distinctive takes on giallo and horror (though, as will be seen, the two shade into one another as filone are wont to do) and arrived at a critical juncture in his career. Argento's first three gialli had, it will be remembered, established him as Italy's foremost exponent of the form. The problem was that his concerns and those of the public were diverging. Where Argento favoured the experimental strategies of Four Flies on Grey Velvet and the use of the giallo as springboard for the investigation of broader - and decidedly arthouse - concerns like art, alienation, gender politics and the phenomenology of perception, box office receipts indicated that the broader public preferred the relatively conventional formulaic approach of Cat o' Nine Tails.61

Le cinque giornate had proven too much of a departure to provide answers. Deep Red thus saw the working out/through of a solution: excess would allow Argento to explore his own distinctive concerns while simultaneously meeting, problematising and perhaps ultimately transforming perceived audience requirements from the filone. Suspiria then showcased the development of excess as an overall structuring principle, giving an excess of excess as it were, through the combination of the Barthesian surfeit of meaning62 of its predecessor with more operatic emphases. The operatic, however, appears less Italian than Germanic, in terms of the totalising gesamtkunstwerk of the Wagnerian Ring cycle versus the fragmentation and separation of the Brechtian Threepenny Opera. These competing theories in turn raise broader questions as to the fundamental nature and purpose of cinema itself that re-main relevant today even as they illustrate the difficulty, if not outright impossibility, of fully apprehending Argento's rich, complex and often contradictory cinema through any one single interpretive framework.

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